This year’s BPM conference

will take place in Barcelona,

Spain. BPM 2017 is the 15th

conference in a series that

provides the most prestig-

ious forum for researchers

and practitioners in the field

of Business Process Manage-

ment (BPM). The deadlines for the main conference are rapidly approaching. Make

sure to submit your abstract

before March 6th, and your

full paper before March

13th, 2017. The conference

will also host 15 wonderful

workshops covering all as-

pects of BPM. The deadlines

for these workshops are in

May. BPM 2017 is hosted by

UPC, the largest engineer-

ing university in Catalonia,

Spain. The conference will

take place at the beautiful

and easily accessible

UPC Nord Campus. Next to

the conference the tourist

office lists 100 additional

reasons to visit Barcelona in

September: Sagrada Famíl-

ia, Park Güell, Palau de la

Música Catalana, FC Barcelo-

na's Camp Nou, the beach-

es, and the mountains in

the north. Hope to see you

all in Barcelona!

Issue 1/2017 February, 2017

Is your BPM 2017 paper Ready?

BPM Newsletter

Sixteen BPM 2017

Workshops!

Interview with Gero Decker from

Signavio

Responsible BPM

Barcelona in Sep-

tember

Three BPM 2017

Keynotes

New SC member:

Jan Mendling

Three new

“procesjes”

Process mining con-

tests

News from the com-

munity

Next to presenting the vari-

ous events and activities

related to the BPM confer-

ence in Barcelona, this issue

of the BPM Newsletter also

includes an interview with

Gero Decker (co-founder of

Signavio) on trends in BPM,

a column on responsible

BPM, a few new “procesjes”

(funny reflections on our

profession), and a warm

welcome to our new SC

member Jan Mendling.

Moreover, pointers to relat-

ed events and activities such

as open-online BPM courses

and competitions are given.

Enjoy reading the newslet-

ter while preparing for BPM

2017.

Abstract submission: 6 March, 2017

Full paper submission: 13 March, 2017

Notifications: 15 May, 2017

Camera ready papers: 12 June, 2017

Conference: 11-14 September, 2017

The origins of the city of Barcelona,

which have been defined thanks to

archaeological remains and literary and

cartographic sources, date from the 1st

century A.D., when the Romans estab-

lished a small colony around the Taber

mount. Its whole past is projected into

its present.

The Barcelona of the 21st century is a

city shaped by the '92 Olympics, a city

transformed for and by the need to do

justice to that great international event.

The Barcelona we see around us now,

the Barcelona we enjoy today, is a new

Barcelona, Mediterranean in keeping

with its traditions, with its face to the

sea and its arms open to other cultures

and peoples, giving and receiving, hap-

py to make and to share its riches.

The Barcelona of the 21st century is an

European capital of astonishing cultural

energy and a passion for progress, a city

whose day-to-day life brings together

every imaginable facet of the most di-

verse activities: these are the potential

that has fashioned the city's present

and give it the impetus to move for-

ward into the future.

There are two official languages in Bar-

celona: Catalan and Spanish, and there

are more and more people in the re-

gion who understand and speak Eng-

ence. Nord Campus can be easily

reached by Metro, Tram, or Bus from

any location in the city. Rooms in sever-

al hotels/residences nearby the confer-

ence venue are already reserved to ease

the accommodation to attendees.

The conference will be held mainly in

the Vertex Building, where the Auditori-

um, Garden and many rooms are availa-

ble for the different activities that will

take place.

Social activities are still to be decided,

but for sure will not miss the flavor this

great city has!

See you in Barcelona!

Josep Camona

General chair of BPM 2017

P A G E 2

lish. You're sure to get by.

The people of Barcelona are generally

very friendly, calm, helpful and gener-

ous. To most, maintaining enduring

relationships is more important than the

desire for more and more material

wealth. Outside the tourist heart of the

city, which many Barcelonans prefer to

avoid, you can expect people to come

up to you in the street offering help if

you are looking lost. In the tourist areas,

however, such approaches are less

common.

The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

(UPC) will host BPM 2017. UPC is one of

the top engineering universities in Spain

in several rankings (31.224 students, 63

different degrees, 62 masters, 205 con-

solidated research groups).

UPC Nord Campus hosts the confer-

B P M N E W S L E T T E R

Barcelona: an historic and human angle

BPM 2017 is hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, one

of the top engineering universities in Spain

Auditorium used for

the main BPM track

Process execution, monitoring and

intelligence

Alongside the main research track, a

dedicated industry track will host pa-

pers on problems and experiences relat-

ed to the deployment of BPM in prac-

tice. The new “BPM Forum” track will

continue this year following its success-

ful debut in 2016. It will include a selec-

tion of papers with stimulating and in-

novative ideas that missed the main

research track.

See our call for papers at https://

bpm2017.cs.upc.edu/. The key dates for

The submission deadline for BPM is al-

most here! This is our final invitation for

papers. In addition to papers on bread

and butter areas of BPM, we seek your

help to expand the conference’s prior

focus on operational BPM by submitting

work on the management aspects of

the discipline, such as BPM strategic

alignment and governance, where now

more than ever research is needed. We

would also welcome work that spans

emerging and interdisciplinary aspects

of BPM, such as decision management

and BPM, social BPM, collective adaptive

processes and mobile processes.

Boundary spanning work will receive

special consideration. Help us to push

the horizons of the discipline.

These interests are reflected in the six

thematic areas of the call for papers:

BPM in a broader context

Emerging areas of BPM

Management aspects of BPM

Process identification and modeling

foundations

·Process analysis and improvement

the main research track are:

Abstract submission: 6 March, 2017

Full papers submission: 13 March,

2017

Notifications: 15 May, 2017

Camera ready papers: 12 June, 2017

We are looking forward to your papers!

So, there is still some time left but not

much. Please get your final versions

ready and submit soon. Do join us in Bar-

celona!!

Josep Carmona, Gregor Engels, and

Akhil Kumar

BPM 2017 Program Committee Chairs

P A G E 3 I S S U E 1 / 2 0 1 7

BPM 2017 Get ready to submit your Papers, Soon!

The BPM conference traditionally fea-

tures a strong workshop program that

provides a forum for presentations and

discussions of on-going research initia-

tives and early results. This year's call for

workshop proposals received great in-

terest: a total of 20 proposals were sub-

mitted. Given the large number of pro-

posals, we tried to accommodate for a

diverse spectrum of topics and a bal-

ance of established themes and novel

directions.

Among the 15 workshops that have

been selected to be organized at the

BPM 2017 conference are classics such

as the 13th edition of BPI, for the first

time planned as a 2-day event, and the

10th edition of BPMS2. Yet, there are

also newcomers: BPM 2017 will feature

a number of first time workshops that

cover hot topics such as BPM and Artifi-

cial Intelligence, the Internet-of-Things,

e-Government, cognitive BPM, data

quality aspects, and security and privacy

tunity to share your ideas with others in

a wonderful environment!

We look forward to an inspiring work-

shop program and hope you will join us

in Barcelona!

Ernest and Matthias

BPM 2017 Workshop Chairs

P A G E 4

considerations.

Information about the workshops is

available on the BPM conference web-

site. The submission deadline for the

workshops is May 26, 2017. We encour-

age you to submit to your favorite work-

shop since this is an excellent oppor-

B P M N E W S L E T T E R

Classics and Newcomers – The BPM 2017 Workshops

The fifteen accepted BPM 2017 workshops cover the whole BPM

spectrum. The workshop proceedings are published by Springer

International Workshop on Business Process Innovation with Artificial In-

telligence (BPAI’17)

13th International Workshop on Business Process Intelligence (BPI’17)

International Workshop on Ubiquitous Business Processes Meeting Inter-

net-of-Things (BP-Meet-IoT’17)

International Workshop in Business Process Management Application to

the e-Government domain (BPMGOV’17)

10th Workshop on Social and Human Aspects of Business Process Man-

agement (BPMS2’17)

1st Workshop on Cognitive Business Process Management (CBPM’17)

5th International Workshop on Declarative/Decision/Hybrid Mining and

Modelling for Business Processes (DeHMiMoP’17)

3rd International Workshop on Process Engineering (IWPE’17)

2nd International Workshop on Process Querying (PQ’17)

1st International Workshop on Quality Data for Process Analytics (QD-

PA’17)

3rd International Workshop on Interrelations between Requirements Engi-

neering and Business Process Management (REBPM’17)

2nd Workshop on Resource Management in Business Processes (ReMa’17)

2nd international Workshop on Sustainability-Aware Business Process

Management (SABPM’17)

Workshop on Security and Privacy-enhanced Business Process Manage-

ment (SPBP’17)

6th Workshop on Theory and Application of Visualizations and Human-

centric Aspects in Processes (TAProViz’17)

grown to a company with over 140

employees. Recently, the scope of

Signavio is broadening and the soft-

ware now also supports decision man-

agement and conformance checking. In

this interview, Gero reflects on develop-

ments in BPM in recent years.

When and why did you get the idea to

start the Signavio Company?

Gero: In 2006, we started the Open

Source project “Oryx” in Prof. Weske’s

research group at Hasso-Plattner-

Institute. Why? As researchers, we ex-

perimented with different process mod-

eling notations and needed a platform

to build our prototypes on. Eclipse was

the framework of choice in those days,

but it did not work for us: It was a pain

to install desktop applications on stu-

dents’ workstations. So we built a

browser-based solution and made it

available to everyone over the web. The

uptake by fellow academics but also

from outside academia was pretty im-

pressive. One day, we were featured in

In 2009, four former students of the

Hasso Plattner Institute founded

Signavio, a Berlin-based software com-

pany specialized in Business Process

Management (BPM), Business Decision

Management (BDM), Workflow Auto-

mation (WA), and Business Process In-

telligence (BPI). As students they devel-

oped the first version of the Signavio

Process Editor that served as the later

basis for this rapidly growing software

company. One of the co-founders is

Gero Decker who did his PhD in the

Business Process Technology (BPT) re-

search group of prof. Mathias Weske.

Gero wrote a PhD thesis on service cho-

reographies, process modeling lan-

guages, and the link between service-

oriented architectures and business

process management. He presented his

work at several instances of our BPM

conference and managed to successful-

ly transfer knowledge between aca-

demia and industry. Signavio was the

first completely web-based collaborative

BPM editor. In a few years Signavio has

a major tech blog and suddenly saw

thousands of new users on our system

within minutes. These are the moments

when you think: Wow, you are really on

to something. That was the moment

when we decided to build a “real” prod-

uct and continue as a commercial compa-

ny.

What is the BPM paper you are most

proud of? Why?

Gero: Publishing a paper at the BPM con-

ference is always a big honor. I think the

paper that created the biggest impact

was actually a workshop: “Interaction

Modeling using BPMN” from 2007, co-

authored by Alistair Barros. It influenced

the BPMN community quite a bit, up to

the point that “choreography modeling”

was added as a separate diagram type in

BPMN 2.0. Too bad that this diagram type

never really took off in practice, though.

So better drop it again from BPMN 3.0,

should that version ever come…

What is currently your largest customer?

How do they use Signavio?

Gero: Our largest customer is a bank that

has adopted Signavio on a huge scale.

Several thousand people have been

trained on BPMN and DMN and are ac-

tively using Signavio in the context of

their “industrialization” strategy. Signavio

has become the single source of truth for

everything operations and has enabled

process oriented thinking throughout the

organization. It allowed to significantly

lower the cost of change by taking a

model-based approach to organizational

change and process / decision automa-

tion. For instance, implementing a new

regulation now only takes 4-6 months

instead of 18-24 months previously. At

this customer, we are interfacing with a

number of Open Source products on the

P A G E 5 I S S U E 1 / 2 0 1 7

Interview with Gero Decker, co-founder of Signavio

Gero Decker

co-founder of Signavio

P A G E 6 B P M N E W S L E T T E R

interested in “Digital Transformation”,

because it allows leveraging the ever

growing amounts of data for operation-

al decision making.

With the new product Signavio Process

Intelligence you are now moving in the

process mining direction with functions

like conformance checking and bottle-

neck analysis. What triggered this deci-

sion and can you describe the new

functionality?

Gero: Since founding the company, we

have focused a lot on leveraging the

“wisdom of the crowd”, i.e. to engage

as many people as possible into the

discussions around process. However, a

people-centric approach has certain

limits, especially in very large organiza-

tions. You cannot send consultants or

business analysts into all 28 factories to

find out why they are showing so vastly

workflow and rules automation side.

At an early stage you invested in deci-

sion management. Why?

Gero: “Can’t you do for rules what you

have done for process?” This was a

question, many of our customers asked

us, especially those who use models for

automation purposes. They wanted to

put business users in the driver seat,

enabling them to define, test and vali-

date decision rules all the way up to

executability. At Signavio, we were re-

luctant to implement rules functionality

for quite some time, because we did not

want to implement any proprietary rule

notation / language. When the beta

version of DMN was published by OMG,

we immediately jumped on it. Many of

our customers believe that decisions are

an essential aspect of BPM. DMN fits

well into a time where everybody is

different productivity. Nor can’t you let

people dig through all the billions of

transactions to see which one of them

showed undesired behavior. Process min-

ing is a powerful approach to add data-

based insights into the mix. It speeds up

the whole improvement cycle and lowers

the cost of analyzing as-is processes.

Signavio Process Intelligence is a mix of

process discovery, conformance checking

and business intelligence, deeply integrat-

ed with our modeling product, the

Signavio Process Editor. Process discovery,

especially when focusing on the 60-80%

most typical cases, gives you a good first

picture on which paths a process takes in

IT systems. Through modeling, you intro-

duce the business vocabulary people can

relate to and define the right scope and

abstraction level for the process. Finally,

conformance & BI gives you an under-

standing of deviations and performance

characteristics of the process versus your

expectation (the model).

What are the challenges you think the

BPM community should focus on?

Gero: Process Mining is still in its infancy

in terms of industry adoption. With in-

creased usage in the coming years, many

more questions for the academic BPM

community will arise. There is already

very good foundational work on process

discovery and conformance checking. At

Signavio, we are particularly interested in

the intersection of process mining and

process modeling, as well as the role of

decision models & making in this context.

As a second area of interest, extending

BPM in the direction of Business Architec-

ture, in particular strategy, capability and

customer journey maps, has risen a lot in

demand with practitioners.

Thanks for the interview!

Process mining is a powerful approach to add data-based insights

into the mix. It speeds up the whole improvement cycle and lowers

the cost of analyzing as-is processes.

Miguel Valdés leads Bonitasoft mission:

to democratize Business Process Man-

agement (BPM), bringing powerful and

affordable

BPM to

organiza -

tions and

projects of

all sizes.

Bonitasoft

builds a

BPM-based

application

platform to create customized business

applications without the cost and rigidi-

ty of long, unpredictable custom devel-

opment cycles. As the world's fastest-

growing BPM provider, Bonitasoft has

thousands of customers and an open

source community of more than

120,000 members. Prior to Bonitasoft,

Miguel led R&D, pre-sales and support

for the BPM division of Bull Information

Systems, a major European systems

provider. Miguel is a recognized

thought-leader in business process

management and passionate about

open source community building.

Professor Dr. Mathias Weske is chair of

the business process technology re-

search group at Hasso Plattner Institute

of IT Systems Engineering at the Univer-

sity of Potsdam, Germany. The research

group aims at addressing real-world

problems in business process manage-

ment with formal approaches and engi-

neering useful prototypes. His research

focuses on the engineering of process

oriented information systems, decision

management, and event handling. In

addition to running the BPM Academic

Initiative bpmai.org, the BPT research

group has a track record in engineered

prototypes with a significant impact on

The three keynotes at BPM 2017 will be

given by Alan W. Brown (Business

School at University of Surrey), Miguel

Valdés (Bonitasoft CEO and co-

founder), and Mathias Weske (Hasso-

Plattner-Institut at the University of Pots-

dam). As usual one keynote is given by

a BPM researcher (Mathias Weske), one

is given by someone working in a

neighboring research discipline (Alan

Brown), and someone working in the

BPM industry (Miguel Valdés). These

keynotes are another good reason to

attend the conference in Barcelona in

September!

Alan W. Brown is Professor of Entrepre-

neurship and Innovation at the Univer-

sity of Surrey’s Business School. Alan’s

research is focused on the relationship

between technology innovation and

business innovation in today’s rapidly-

evolving digital economy. He has over

25 years of

experience

in commer-

cial high

tech com-

p a n i e s

l e a d i n g

R&D teams,

b u i l d i n g

l e a d i n g -

edge solutions, and driving innovation

in software product delivery. He is the

founder and director of the Surrey

‘Centre for the Digital Economy’ (CoDE).

Alan has a PhD in Computer Science,

and has published numerous books and

papers on software engineering, sys-

tems design, and business transfor-

mation. His most recent co-authored

book is “Digitizing Government: Under-

standing and implementing new digital

business models”.

research and practice, including projects

like Oryx and jBPT. In 2009 he co-

founded Berlin-based software company

Signavio. Dr. Weske is author of the first

textbook on business process manage-

ment and he

held the first

massive open

online course

on the topic

in 2013. With

M a t t h i a s

Kunze, he

published a

textbook on

behavioral models. He on the Editorial

Board of Springer's Distributed and Paral-

lel Databases journal and a founding

member of the steering committee of the

BPM conference series.

P A G E 7 I S S U E 1 / 2 0 1 7

Keynotes @ BPM 2017

During the annual meeting of the BPM

Steering Committee (BPM SC) in Rio, the

BPM SC decided to invite Jan Mendling.

He accepted and joined the BPM SC

since the beginning of the year.

Jan Mendling is a full professor at the

Institute for Information Business

at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU Vi-

enna), Austria.

He is well

known in the

BPM communi-

ty and has

played different

roles in previ-

ous BPM con-

ferences. Jan

was BPM PC

chair in 2010 and BPM workshop chair

in 2014. His research interests cover a

wide range of topics in the area of busi-

ness process management and infor-

process management, and member of

the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining.

His Ph.D. thesis has won the Heinz-

Zemanek-Award of the Austrian Com-

puter Society and the German Targion-

Award for dissertations in the area of

strategic information management.

The BPM SC is very happy that Jan is

willing to contribute his efforts and ex-

perience. One of his first activities will

be to establish the "Best Dissertation in

BPM" award.

P A G E 8

mation systems. He has published more

than 250 research papers and articles,

among others in ACM Transactions on

Software Engineering and Methodolo-

gy, IEEE Transaction on Software Engi-

neering, Information Systems, Data &

Knowledge Engineering, and Decision

Support Systems. He is member of the

editorial board of seven international

journals, member of the board of the

Austrian Society for Process Manage-

ment (http://prozesse.at), one of the

founders of the Berlin BPM Community

of Practice (http://www.bpmb.de), or-

ganizer of several academic events on

B P M N E W S L E T T E R

Jan Mendling Joins the BPM Steering Committee

Jan was BPM PC chair in 2010 and BPM workshop chair in 2014

The MOOC "Fundamentals of BPM" by

Marcello La Rosa, Marlon Dumas, Jan

Mendling and Hajo Reijers is now avail-

able as a Small Private Online Course

(SPOC). The SPOC is a replica of the full

MOOC, coordinated by a designated

lecturer and available only to students

authorized by this lecturer. The SPOC is

ideal for lecturers seeking to run their

BPM course in flipped-classroom, where

students first take the SPOC lesson

online and then meet with the lecturer

in a physical lesson to discuss the topic

in more depth and to complete further

exercises. The first Fundamentals of

BPM SPOC delivery took place in the fall

of 2016 at Politecnico di Milano as part

of the International Master’s in Business

Analytics and Big Data (BABD) coordi-

nated by Barbara Pernici. Further SPOC

deliveries are being held or are pro-

grammed at Commonwealth Bank of

Australia, Queensland University of

Technology and University of Tartu.

Lecturers interested in running a class

using this SPOC can contact the authors

at: bpmtextbook@lists.ut.ee.

Meantime, the same authors continue

to deliver their MOOC in open mode.

The next delivery of a condensed ver-

sion of the MOOC will take place start-

ing from 6 March 2017 on the Future-

Learn platform: www.futurelearn.com/

courses/business-process-management

The MOOC "Fundamentals of BPM" now

available for flipped-classroom use

The BPI Challenge, sponsored by Celo-

nis (www.celonis.com) and Minit

(www.minitlabs.com), has become a

tradition for the workshop, as well as

the conference participants. The public

real-life datasets made available

through this challenge are used in

many papers and serve as a validation

baseline. One of the most successful

datasets was the 2012 dataset from a

Dutch financial institute and this year,

we have found the same company will-

ing to share data of the same process,

five years later. The data is richer than

before, the process has grown in inten-

sity and while the supporting system

was replaced, the process is largely

comparable.

The Process Discovery contest, spon-

sored by Cognitive Technology

(http://www.cognitive.com.mt/), is ded-

icated to the assessment of tools and

techniques that discover business pro-

cess models from event logs. The objec-

tive is to compare the efficiency of tech-

Traditionally, the Business Process Intel-

ligence workshop has been the largest

workshop at the conference. Over the

years, the workshop grew and included

the BPI Challenge, the Process Discov-

ery contest and the IEEE Task force

meeting. That combined with the large

number of people in the audience, the

organizers this year proposed a two day

event for the 13th edition of the BPI

workshop.

The workshop, sponsored by Siav

(www.siav.com), is aiming to attract the

same high-quality papers as previous

years, with sufficient space and time for

the researchers to present their findings

to a focused audience. The paper

presentations will be alternated by

presentations of the winners of the BPI

Challenge and the PD contest. On Sun-

day evening, a BPI-reception will be

hosted for the participants and the

workshop closes with the annual meet-

ing of the IEEE Task force on process

mining.

niques to discover process models. Com-

pared with last year, this year the compe-

tition will not only consider the ability of

discovering process models balancing

"overfitting" and "underfitting", but also

the capacity of mining models that pro-

vide business value to stakeholders.

We hope to see many of you at the BPI

Workshop in Barcelona. The workshop is

included in the regular workshop partici-

pation fee and more information is availa-

ble on http://www.win.tue.nl/bpi/

Boudewijn van Dongen, Andrea Burattin,

Jan Claes, and Jochen De Weerdt

Chairs of BPI 2017

P A G E 9 I S S U E 1 / 2 0 1 7

Business Process Intelligence Workshop @ BPM 2017

foster collaborations between Latin-

American researchers.

The school will be held at the campus

of the University of Los Andes and is

being organized by the Department of

Systems and Computing Engineering

together with the Department of Sys-

tem Engineering of the National Tech-

nological University and the Instituto de

Informática UFRGS of the Universidade

Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

The 2nd LAS-BPM will consist of four

days of short courses and meetings to

discuss different state-of-art topics re-

garding BPM, followed by discussions

designed to establish cooperation opor-

The 2nd Latin-American Summer School

on BPM (LAS-BPM) will be held in Bogo-

tá – Colombia between June 27 and

June 30 (2017) and will offer an oppor-

tunity to bring together both practition-

ers and researchers around the Busi-

ness Process Management field and

study some of its more exciting develop-

ments.

The school aims to bring together, for a

week, the young and growing genera-

tion of Latin-American researchers with

practitioners that are both building and

using today’s strongest BPM platforms.

This space should offer plenty of oppor-

tunities to strengthen relationships be-

tween academia and industry, and to

tunities. Students will also be given the

opportunity to present their research

works to their peers, fellow practitioners,

and to courses’ lecturers in order to get

valuable feedback.

Confirmed lecturers include: Marlon Du-

mas on Process Mining, Lucineia Thom on

Business Process Concepts and Modeling,

Pablo Villareal on Inter-Organizational

BPM, Mario Sánchez on Process Simula-

tion, and Oscar González on Process

Analysis and Governance.

See https://ii-las-bpm.uniandes.edu.co/

for more information.

Oscar González-Rojas and Mario Sánchez II LAS-BPM Co-chairs

Second Latin American School on BPM

The Dutch Responsible Data Science

(RDS) initiative aims to address ques-

tions related to Fairness, Accuracy, Con-

fidentiality, and Transparency (FACT) by

providing positive technological solu-

tions. These solutions aim to protect

people and organizations against the

possible negative side effects of data

science and Big data. The goal is to

make IT systems “responsible by de-

sign”. Obviously, business process man-

agement and data science are closely

connected. This is reflected by the up-

take of process mining techniques.

Moreover, also other BPM approaches

are becoming more and more data driv-

en. Workers, customers, citizens, pa-

tients and other individuals that depend

on processes are affected by BPM tech-

nology. Although not always visible,

BPM systems and approaches decide on

the prioritization of cases and the distri-

bution of work. However, the BPM com-

munity seldom discusses the effects of

BPM on the lives or working conditions

of people. Therefore, it is interesting to

discuss the Responsible Data Science

(RDS) initiative and see how ingredients

can be used to make BPM systems and

approaches more responsible.

In the RDS initiative the leading Dutch

data science groups joined forces to

tackle four main challenges:

Data science without prejudice –

How to avoid unfair conclusions

even if they are true?

Data science without guesswork –

How to answer questions with a

guaranteed level of accuracy?

Data science that ensures confiden-

tiality – How to answer questions

without revealing secrets?

Data science that provides trans-

parency – How to clarify answers

such that they become indisputa-

ble?

addressing these problems will lead to a

”Big data winter” where data are widely

misused and data science results are

deeply mistrusted. RDS brings together

the top researchers in the Netherlands

from key disciplines like data/process

mining, digital humanities, ethics, infor-

mation retrieval, knowledge representa-

tion, law, machine learning, natural

language processing, security, statistics,

and visualization. Wil van der Aalst is

leading this initiative which involves

over 25 groups from a dozen Dutch

universities and research centers. The

website

www.responsibledatascience.org

provides more information on the RDS

initiative and the RDS seminar series.

An interesting question for the BPM

community is what we can learn from

RDS. Shouldn’t we focus on challenges

related to Fairness, Accuracy, Confiden-

tiality, and Transparency in BPM?

P A G E 1 0

We can all witness that Big data is

changing the way we do business, so-

cialize, conduct research, and govern

society. Data are collected on anything,

at any time, and in any place. Data

abundance combined with powerful

data science techniques has the poten-

tial to dramatically improve our lives by

enabling new services and products,

while improving their efficiency and

quality. The importance of data science

is widely acknowledged, but there are

also great concerns about the use of

data. Increasingly, customers, patients,

and other stakeholders are concerned

about irresponsible data use. Automat-

ed data decisions may be unfair or non-

transparent. Confidential data may be

shared unintentionally or abused by

third parties. Each step in the “data sci-

ence pipeline” may create inaccuracies,

e.g., if the data used to learn a model

reflects existing social biases, the algo-

rithm is likely to incorporate these bias-

es. These concerns could lead to re-

sistance against the large-scale use of

data and make it impossible to reap the

benefits of data science.

The problems addressed by RDS are

extremely urgent and challenging. Not

B P M N E W S L E T T E R

Responsible Data Science, also for BPM ?

"Procesje" reports on the irrational be-

havior of organizations and people thus

putting BPM technology in perspective.

This page shows again some example

‘procesjes’.

Inspired by the “daily astonishment in

the BPM world”, the Dutch BPM practi-

tioner Emiel Kelly started to make

‘procesjes’ (little processes) to reflect on

BPM trends in a playful manner. A

If you want to see more funny BPM posts,

please visit Procesje.nl or follow

@Procesje (occasionally also in English)

on twitter.

P A G E 1 1 I S S U E 1 / 2 0 1 7

Do you want to know the fastest way

to save money with process Mapping?

thesis that won

the 2015 Process

Mining Disserta-

tion Award. This

award is con-

ferred by the IEEE

Task Force on

Process Mining

and given to truly

outstanding PhD

theses in the area

of business pro-

cess intelligence.

Next to the MOOC "Fundamentals of

BPM" by Marcello La Rosa, Marlon Du-

mas, Jan Mendling and Hajo Reijers

mentioned earlier in this newsletter, the

Coursera MOOC “Process Mining: Data

science in Action” is now running in on-

demand mode. Over 100.000 people

participated in the course. It is now also

possible to also the course in a flipped

classroom setting. Visit www.coursera.

org/learn/process-mining for more in-

formation. The FutureLearn MOOC

“”Introduction to Process Mining with

ProM starts again on the 24th or April

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/

process-mining/.

A special issue of Information Systems

based on the best papers from BPM

2015 has been published (Volume 64,

March 2017). The special issue contains

four BPM papers covering topics such

as business process compliance (David

Knuplesch et al.), declarative process

The workshop Algorithms & Theories

for the Analysis of Event Data

(ATAED'2017) is a satellite event of both

Petri nets 2017 and ACSD 2017. The

workshop aims to attract papers related

to Process Mining, Region Theory and

other synthesis techniques. The dead-

line for papers is March 31st, 2017. The

workshop is supported by the IEEE Task

Force on Process Mining. See http://

www.fernuni-hagen.de/ataed2017/ for

more information.

The proceedings of the BPM Demo

Track 2016 edited by Leonardo Azeve-

do, Cristina Cabanillas are now available

via http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1789. This is

a good trigger to prepare your demo

paper for BPM 2017.

The book “Conformance Checking and

Diagnosis in Process Mining” by Jorge

Munoz-Gama is now available in Spring-

er’s LNBIP series. It is based on his PhD

models (Claudio Di Ciccio et al.), detec-

tion of textual inconsistencies in process

models (Han van der Aa), and temporal

process constraints (Akhil Kumar et al.).

On November 11th, 2016, the IEEE

Standards Association has officially pub-

lished the XES Standard as IEEE Std

1 8 4 9 T M - 2 0 1 6 : I E E E S t a n d a r d

for eXtensible Event Stream (XES) for

Achieving Interoperability in Event Logs

and Event Streams. The IEEE Task Force

on Process Mining has been driving the

standardization process for over six years,

because the standard allows for the ex-

change of event data between different

process mining tools.

The goal of this newsletter is to further strengthen the

BPM community that has been formed over the last 15

years. The newsletter appears twice per year. Input for the

next newsletter is welcome (e.g. activities related to the

BPM conference, online courses, interviews, contests, new

datasets, tools, etc.).

Wil van der Aalst (chair), Boualem Benatallah, Jörg Desel, Marlon Dumas, Schahram Dustdar, Jan Mendling, Michael zur Muehlen, Manfred Reichert, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Barbara Weber and Mathias Weske.

Events and Activities of the

Community

For contributions and comments, contact the Editor (Wil van der Aalst), WWW: vdaalst.com, E-mail: w.m.p.v.d.aalst@tue.nl.

PUBLISHED BY THE STEERING COMMITTEE OF THE BPM CONFERENCE SERIES

Visit

bpm-conference.org

ATAED'2017

Zaragoza

Spain

BPM

BPM 2017